A Morning with the Audubon Society

Note: It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Pieces I was working on for this month just haven’t come together, due to some unanticipated circumstances (maybe more on that later). I feel the urge to apologize for not posting regularly, but the truth is, I’m not a machine, and I never want to strive to be one. Thanks for being willing readers no matter how far apart these articles are.

Near the end of April, on a chilly morning soft with the new green of the trees, Theo and I show up at the nature conserve for a bird walk. I keep my hands in my hoodie pockets; he does, too. We edge our way into the clutch of people waiting to begin, and I look around, gauging the group. Several people with gray or white hair, a couple of younger people maybe in their thirties. Most people have binoculars around their necks, and their faces are bright and eager.

Theo shivers. “Are you cold, buddy?” I ask.

He nods and I gather him close to me, rubbing his arms briskly.

“Do you think it will begin shortly?” he asks.

The woman with a gray bob standing next to me glances at him, and then at me, her eyes twinkling.

“Listen to him talk!” she laughs. “How old is he?”

“He’s four.” I say.

“Well, I bet he’s learning to read already, isn’t he?”

I smile. Yes, he is.

The other people in our group are likewise thrilled with my son, their eyes lighting up whenever he talks, sharing bird facts with his attentive audience. (“Did you know the cowbird lays eggs in other bird’s nests?”) The leader of our group, Amanda, is a young woman with auburn curls, a magenta Columbia pullover, olive green hiking pants, and brown hiking boots with magenta detailing that matches the pullover. She shows my son the viewfinder that’s trained on an osprey nest and lowers the equipment to his height. He clambers up on the bench in front of the viewfinder and breaks into a grin when he spots the white head bobbing above the nest.

“Look, mommy! Do you think it’s like a hawk?”

Amanda pulls out her bird guide from the crook of her arm and shows him the pictures of the osprey and then the hawk. “Look at their legs. This is how you tell them apart: the hawk has bare legs, see? And the osprey has feathers on its legs.”

He nods, and then asks to go back to the viewfinder, almost bouncing with excitement.

Our group walks along the trail slowly, often coming to a dead stop for ten minutes in order to locate a bird in the trees or turn on the Merlin app to catch a song someone doesn’t recognize. When I click on the recording button within the app, six birds show up within minutes. I strain to differentiate them in the cacophony of melodies, shrieks, and whistles. I’m not used to focusing on sensory input like this. My eyes, too, soon grow weary of scanning the bright green trees tossing in the wind, looking for a flash of color, a bird on the wing or resting on a branch.

The rest of the group is gracious with my inexperience. They teach me the mnemonics of various bird songs—for example, the “flicka, flicka, flicka” of the northern flicker, or the “sweet, sweet, sweet, I’m so sweet” of the yellow rumped warbler. (This tiny bird, by the way, does indeed have a patch of yellow on its rear, what bird-watchers call a “butter-butt.”)

When I see a colorful bird out of the corner of my eye, flitting through the woods, I wonder aloud whether it could be a scarlet tanager? That’s one of the birds listed on the bird bingo card handed to me at the beginning of the morning. Amanda doesn’t laugh at my ignorance, but simply explains that it was most likely a cardinal; scarlet tanagers don’t migrate into this area until a few weeks later in the season. I brush off my embarrassment—after all, no one here really minds that I know a fraction of what they do.

Eventually we come to the lake shore. There’s a short dock, bobbing in the waves. My son, tired now of an hour of looking for birds, seeks another adventure. Slowly, he eases out onto the dock, a thrilled look on his face. I watch him from a few yards away, amused. I know what’s coming next. Sure enough, a few feet from the end of the dock, he looks back at the shore and I see his expression shift. He’s afraid, unsure, but wants to push himself. He makes an internal decision and he walks to the dock’s end, then beams. I chuckle. He doesn’t see me watching.

While I continue gazing at the water and the trees with the rest of the group, my son runs off to a pavilion where one woman sits, resting her legs. I catch bits of their conversation on the breeze. He’s talking about nests—there’s one in the corner of the pavilion, high above his head. She smiles at him, relaxed.

Amanda tells me that one night this week, ornithologists who use weather radar to track bird migration estimated that 1.4 million birds flew over our state. “That’s compared to 11,000 last night,” she notes. My mouths drops a little. I think of all that happens in the natural world that I don’t notice, how over a million birds, their wings dark in the night, can pass over me as I sleep. And during the day, too, I don’t pay much mind to the many bird songs in our suburban neighborhood: blue jay and cardinal, robin and crow, sparrow and starling. I walk, oblivious to their whistling voices and the tiny lives they live so wholeheartedly, industriously. No wonder Jesus used the birds as an illustration of his care for us. His ears absorb every note of their song, every throb of their hearts in their small breasts—of course, of course, then, how deep and attentive must be his love for us.1

Finally, an hour and a half into the walk, I’m thinking about heading home. Theo is walking more slowly, and he’s tripped and fallen once into the mud of the path. My head is spinning from focusing so acutely on what I can see and hear. I’m one spot away from a bingo on the bird bingo card, but I didn’t expect to get one anyway. Maybe it’s time to call it quits?

Then, Jen, the woman next to me, gasps. “Look, it’s a gnatcatcher!” She raises her binoculars at a group of trees. I strain my eyes, again. There! A streak of gray-blue, and then the bird is gone, off to another tree.

“You have to see this. The sunlight is reflecting off his feathers!” She turns to me and pulls the binoculars over her curly gray ponytail. “Here. Look at the tree over there, leaning to the left.”

I lift the binoculars. All I can see is glittering green and gold, a mass of leaves tangled with sunshine. I scan up and down the tree trunk, but it’s too late. The bird’s already moved on. But he’s given my son and me our bingo, the first bingo of the group.

We’re ready to go now. I ask Amanda when the group meets again and tell her we might be back. Theo waves goodbye to everyone, and they wave back, grinning. I walk hand in hand with Theo to the van and we get in, strap our seatbelts. I hand him a snack.

Five minutes down the road, I hear a deep sigh from the back seat. “Mommy, that was really fun, but it was tiring.”

I laugh. “I know, buddy. I know.”

It was tiring to cast out our attention like a net over the trees, catching the sounds, the colors, the lines. It was tiring to absorb so much new information so quickly, as the other members of our group schooled us on the birds.

But whoever has eyes to see, let them see. Let them see a child running through the grass with brightness glimmering around the edges of his being. Let them see the sacredness, the preciousness of him. Let them see the birds weaving their nests in the trees, taking wing to find their food. And whoever has ears to hear, let them hear. Let them hear those songs. Let them note the kill-dee, kill-dee of the killdeer and the robin’s cheerily. Let them listen to the child, the water, the wind in the April trees.

For they are blessed.